TWO WHEELS GOOD

The countries hoping to host the 2018 and/or 2022 World Cups delivered their bid books to Fifa today. England looked to cover all the bases with David Beckham's stardust and a weighty War-and-Peace thick tome lightened by a cover featuring a St George's Cross face-painted young scamp. Australia stared national stereotypes right in the eye and blinked first by putting a kangaroo kicking a football on the front. Japan went with an audacious multimedia affair - a pop-up number complete with PSP that specifically, if rather underwhelmingly, promised "208 smiles".

But, not for the first time, they were all outdone by the Dutch. As grand entrances go, a bunch of suited and booted ex-footballers, led by Ruud Gullit and Johan Cruyff, wobbling along the cobbled road outside Fifa headquarters in Zurich on a variety of brightly painted ladies bikes, while attempting to balance their official Holland/Belgium bid handbags on their handlebars takes some beating. Think Belleville Rendez-vous meets Reservoir Dogs.

Those handbags were the icing on the cake. Former Belgian player Paul van Himst seemed very fond of his, keeping hold of it throughout the ceremony and posing with it for pictures afterwards, while Gullit grinned like a cat who not only had the cream but direct access to a herd of Friesians, and Cruyff, seemingly having borrowed someone else's jacket and trousers for the occasion, looked refreshingly shambolic amid the sobriety and stage management.

As an exercise in emphasising a bid's eco-credentials it certainly did the trick and Sepp Blatter, presumably buoyed by the imminent prospect of a two-hour vol-au-vent-fuelled Fifa bunfight, kept his smile on throughout. However, it's hard to escape the feeling that he's the sort of man to be more impressed by a bid team roaring into Zurich in a swarm of Lamborghinis than one whose entire campaign could be derailed by a puncture.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"I've never been asked to climb a mountain before but I know it's going to be pretty treacherous. I'm a little bit wary of the weather conditions and I've never slept rough before. As for the altitude, I've never been that high up, apart from flying" - Tony Pulis isn't really giving off an air of confidence ahead of his climb of Kilimanjaro.

IMPOSSIBILITY OF THE DAY

29 April: "It is impossible that Berlusconi said [that Leonardo is going]. Leonardo will be at Milan next season" - Rossoneri vice-president Adriano Galliani steadfastly denies reports of managerial change.

14 May: "There are no surprises, everything is very clear, today as always. We have reached the end" - Galliani confirms Leonardo's departure.

EVERY ASH CLOUD ...

The Fiver spent an hour and a half this afternoon convulsing, literally convulsing, with horror at the near-certainty that, sometime tomorrow afternoon, Ashley Cole will become the most successful player in the entire 138-year history of the FA Cup when he picks up his sixth winners' medal, surpassing five-time-winners Arthur Kinnaird (1873-1882), Charles Wollaston (1872-1878) and Jimmy Forrest (1884-1891). And they don't really count, obviously, because they won stuff before football really began in 1992.

This thought alone is almost enough to have us wearing a ludicrous hat, clanging a bell, changing our name by deedpoll to The Portsmouth Football Club Fiver and staring goggle-eyed at our astonished housemates for the entirety of tomorrow afternoon.

For this year's FA Cup final presents the neutral with a particularly difficult task. Tomorrow we must decide whether we would like a team built on money from Great British charities, small business-owners and taxpayers to bask in glory, or whether we would prefer the trophy to be hoisted aloft by a side constructed using what amounts to another nation's natural inheritance, given away during a dark and weak hour in the country's past and since monetised, exported and converted into so many superyachts and full-backs.

The Fiver would like to apologise to its crack team of in-house lawyers for any future enormous workload created by that paragraph.

One of these two teams must end tomorrow showered in splendour, immersed nostril-deep in a shimmering stream of pure liquid success. And somehow, despite this being no more than a 90-minute-(plus-potential-added-time-and-penalties)-long demonstration of how everything pure and honest and good has been stripped from life like fur from the flayed carcass of a butcher-bound bunny, we are being asked to embrace this as a storyboard-perfect conclusion to another wonderful season. We're being sold some fairytale, crafted by the modern-day Brothers Grimm bunkered deep within the FA's propaganda department, about Pompey's penniless Davids preparing for ballsy battle against Chelsea's merciless Goliaths. The Fiver doesn't buy it for a moment.

"We don't want it to be a fairytale that goes all the way for Portsmouth," growled Frank Lampard. "We have to be ruthless." "I don't believe in fairytales," replied David James as he looked ahead to the big Wembley game. "I like reality." We're with you on the fairytales, Jamo, but reality is rubbish, really, when you think about it.

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FIVER LETTERS

"I was watching daytime TV earlier this week and I couldn't help but be moved by the plight of Dobbin the mule, Rover the dog and members of the world who are apparently doomed unless I stump up £2 a month. Good value, I thought. So, it occurred to me that if I've just irrigated Africa and helped the polar bear for under a fiver, chances are it would cost much less to save Portsmouth. Although they would have to put together an ad, maybe Michael Brown holding out an empty wooden bowl towards the camera, bottom lip quivering ..." - Marten Allen.

"If you're doing your own pedantry now (yesterday's quote of the day), what's the point in the rest of us turning up?" - Tony Henry and 1,056 disappointed others, etc.

"Re: Tony Adams's mixed idioms (Fiver passim). I'll always remember one of his performances against Man Utd in his heyday. It was a Tour de France" - Barry Creed.

BITS AND BOBS

The thoroughly disgraceful ban preventing Togo from competing at the next two Africa Cup of Nations has been officially lifted by the CAF.

Liverpool fans unhappy with the mountain of debt at Anfield are today haranguing Premier League chief suit Richard Scudamore to no avail for having a fit-and-proper person's test that found Tom Hicks and George Gillett to be fit and proper.

And Ross County will not get to wear the Liverpool 1996 tribute cream suits they wanted at tomorrow's Scottish Cup final against Dundee United. "The boys were wanting that but the idea got knocked back very quickly," sniffed striker Andrew Barrowman.